Brando the Analog, Digitized

I just watched a very unusual documentary.

It starts and ends with a computer-generated, digital rendering of him that was captured toward the end of his life.

And in fact this device is a perfect audio-visual metaphor for the feeling of the whole piece.

The legendary analog, digitized from scans made at the end of his life

Heavy, fascinating, somewhat disembodied, with a sense of almost swimming in darkness. While searching constantly for light.

This movie was about life itself.

It’s ironic, or maybe not at all, that a person who has been alleged to be the greatest actor of all time, which is perhaps another way of saying the greatest analog of everyone else’s interior condition, would be the subject, years after his death, of a biography that so honestly and powerfully does precisely what his best acting did.

Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979)

Which is to say that his personal life, which was by all accounts an extremely private one, as depicted by this film successfully inspires massive feeling.
Feeling of identification,
of familiarity,
disappointment,
uncertainty,
searching,
suffering,
meaning.

The way in which you write is poetic, a format which adds to the content itself. I was struck by the sentence, “[i]t’s ironic, or maybe not at all, that a person who has been alleged to be the greatest actor of all time, which is perhaps another way of saying the greatest analog of everyone else’s interior condition, would be the subject,” which reminds me that the value we extract from films is often correlated with the amount we relate to the experience of the actors. I haven’t yet seen this movie, but I trust that I would learn a lot about Marlon Brando, and a little about myself as well.